Sunil Chandran

Sunil Chandran is a veteran industrial biotechnology leader and the Chief Technology Officer at Amyris. Prior to Amyris, Dr. Chandran was the Chief Science Officer at Impossible Foods where he lead their R&D and PD departments, spearheading efforts to introduce new products, improve their existing products, invest in new innovations, and accelerating the scale-up of technology from lab to commercial scale.

Prior to Impossible, Dr. Chandran was the Chief Science Officer and Head of R&D at Amyris Inc., where he spent more than 17 years bringing new fermentation-derived ingredients to market. While at Amyris, he oversaw multiple research programs focused on commercializing various molecules and was the primary architect of the world-class Automated Strain Engineering (ASE) platform. Notably in 2015, Dr. Chandran led an ambitious project that earned Amyris a $35 million Technology Investment Agreement from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Prior to joining Amyris, Dr. Chandran was a scientist at Kosan Biosciences, where he studied the ability of polyketide synthases to make novel pharmaceutical drug candidates. Dr. Chandran has more than 20 published scientific papers, book chapters and patents, and has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences on biotechnology. He holds a BS in chemistry from the University of Mumbai, an MS in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Michigan State University. Dr. Chandran also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.